Abstrct
The problem of other minds is a problem of modern philosophy that can be traced back to the French seventeenth century philosopher René Descartes. Descartes held the dualistic view that, apart from God, there are two kinds of things (or “substances”) in the world: “extended things” and “thinking things”. He thought, in particular, that a human being is a union of an extended thing (a body) and a thinking thing (a mind). He recognized that, given such a view, an account has to be given of how these two fundamentally different things are united, and in particular, how there can be causal interaction between them. But Descartes does not seem to have fully realized that another sort of issue needs to be addressed as well. Consider the following passage from Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy: if I look out the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves […]. Yet do I see more than hats and coats which would conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. (Descartes 1984, 21)
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Notes
- 1.
Other advocates of theory-theory favor an account in terms of innate theory-of-mind “modules” (for discussion, see Gopnik 1996).
- 2.
For a more detailed discussion of theory of mind, see Gallagher and Zahavi 2007, chapter 9.
- 3.
The neutral monists’ (very implausible) further reductive step may be ignored here.
- 4.
In a recent paper on the history of psychology, Alan Costall argues that both the “introspectionism” usually believed to have preceded behaviorism as the dominant trend in psychology and Watsonian behaviorism “were arguing from the same premise, the antithesis of behaviour, on the one hand, and mind and consciousness on the other. Both were committed to an overly subjectivized conception of subjectivity, and an overly objectivized conception of behaviour” (Costall 2006, 649). Interestingly, Costall also argues that the current “cognitivist” paradigm, contra its own self-image, has not abandoned this Cartesian picture. The theory-of-mind debate would seem to support this claim (cf. Leudar and Costall 2004).
- 5.
For a contemporary version of the argument, see Noë 2004.
- 6.
The best explanation argument and at least some versions of theory-theory work with a similar symmetry: mental states as such (whether mine or someone else’s) are unobservable theoretical entities.
- 7.
For discussion of these points, see Overgaard 2007, chapters 5 and 7.
- 8.
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the fifth annual meeting of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology, University of Copenhagen, in April 2007, and at the second workshop of the Research Network on the Philosophy of Mind, University of Hull, in July 2007. I am grateful to both audiences for helpful discussion and to Shaun Gallagher for comments on the penultimate draft of the chapter.
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Overgaard, S. (2010). The Problem of Other Minds. In: Schmicking, D., Gallagher, S. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_14
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